In a paper recently published in the Journal of Business Ethics entitled "The Corporate Psychopaths: Theory of the Global Financial Crisis", Clive R Boddy identifies these people as psychopaths.

"They are," he says, "simply the 1 per cent of people who have no conscience or empathy." And he argues: "Psychopaths, rising to key senior positions within modern financial corporations, where they are able to influence the moral climate of the whole organisation and yield considerable power, have largely caused the [banking] crisis'.

And Mr Boddy is not alone. In Jon Ronson's widely acclaimed book The Psychopath Test, Professor Robert Hare told the author: "I should have spent some time inside the Stock Exchange as well. Serial killer psychopaths ruin families. Corporate and political and religious psychopaths ruin economies. They ruin societies."

Cut to a pleasantly warm evening in Bahrain. My companion, a senior UK investment banker and I, are discussing the most successful banking types we know and what makes them tick. I argue that they often conform to the characteristics displayed by social psychopaths. To my surprise, my friend agrees.

He then makes an astonishing confession: "At one major investment bank for which I worked, we used psychometric testing to recruit social psychopaths because their characteristics exactly suited them to senior corporate finance roles."

There is an author, Charles Stross, who has a pair of books set in the near future where things like corporate audits are done not to evaulate money expenses but corporate ethical behaviors. (Halting State and Rule 34). Fall out from the NEXT mortgage bubble scam I think. Interesting things to read but not like it would ever get enacted. The idea being if corporations are 'people' then they need to behave in a socially acceptable manner.

I've long suspected that not so few people, both traders and ordinary guys who would like to gain ten million bucks, secretly admire Conrad Black. Precisely 'cause he showed "I know how to manipulate the machinery and grab all there is" and could laugh all the way to the bank.

If corporations tend to function like psychopaths it makes sense that they be run by the 1% or so who understand them. That probably won't be good for the general populace though. Although I should note that a lack of empathy does not necessitate a lack of ethics. Corporations will act like psychopaths because it's their nature. Hopefully the government will continue to (or maybe even improve in) regulating them.